The Shaman cries,
the light has died,
he felt it as it left his bones.
He watched it fading from his eyes,
lost to a world where no one knows.
And as he lies down in the grass,
he sheds a tear for mother earth,
Reflects on what has come to pass,
then wonders, prays, for her rebirth.
Shall it all come right next time,
or was it just to test our souls?.
Were we never meant to shine?
before we got to break the mould.
Before the world was bought and sold.
Peter Cullen
What is Shamanism?
Shamanism is an ancient form of healing, where shamans enter alternate states of consciousness in order to communicate with spirits. They communicate with both the deceased as well as the living, and from there help the individuals who seek help from them to break generational curses, find greater harmony in life and directly, to understand more their spiritual purpose and meaning in life. In essence shamans act as spiritual mediators and as guides. Shamans are particularly helpful in guiding individuals who have experienced soul loss due to trauma and in performing soul retrieval work.
Shamanism is in essence animistic, meaning a system that believes that all living things have a soul. Nature is sacred to the shaman, being in touch and in tune with the earth, and her cycles and also the moon and her rhythms. The shaman 'journeys' in an altered state of consciousness into what is called the 'non-ordinary reality', as opposed to this ordinary 3D reality.
Shamans receive their calling when they go through a 'Kawak awakening', a Seers Rite. This awakening allows a shaman to see spirits, and real life very differently, as well as shadow, light and vibrations. A shaman may become incredibly lucid bringing luck but also in many ways a shaman may descend into hell as a result of this gift, hence it is not necessarily common for any person to be shamanic. The shaman though has to deal with the paradox of living in two realities at the same time, despite not becoming anymore intelligent, a problem that shamanic expert Holger Kalweit shows makes 'a shaman a fool who turns everything upside down, but he is a holy fool'. He describes shams as 'the living embodiments of inwardness, of the hidden.... The shaman is a clown, a fool, the reflection of an antimatter universe, a mirror image'. Sadly in a world that is overly mechanical and materialistic, many shamans are scarred by what they see during the Kawak awakening, although thankfully the world has moved on from burning witches out of superstition.
The Three Worlds
In this work the structure of life, the universe, is based on the World Tree. In the Celtic tradition of the British Isles, the tree is the oak or dúir in Gaelic (the doorway) but different cultures will use different trees, native to their land. However, the three worlds are the same: The Lowerworld, the Middleworld and the Upperworld. The Lowerworld is the roots of the tree, the place of wisdom, where the animals and the Ancestors reside, of all that has been. The Middleworld is where we live and move, the trunk of the tree, known as the place of love, where things can change and grow. Finally, the Upperworld is the branches, the place of power, of potential, of all that can and will be, concepts/ideas before they come into manifestation in the middle world.
It can equally be interpreted through the idea of womanhood; that the Lowerworld is the Crone, the one who has spent and taken the time to experience as much as possible, therefore gaining wisdom. The Mother energy resides in the Middleworld, acting as the container, giving life, care and nourishment. And she in-turns feeds this wisdom to the Maiden in the Upperworld who uses this energy for her creativity.
Shamanism and culture
Evidence of shamanic practice has been found in Paleolithic cave art in France (lascaux cave see below), Spain and northern europe. It is thought that Shamanism dates back to the early beginnings of humanity well over 10,000 years ago, perhaps over 30,000 years ago.
Though shamanism is not an organised religion but more of a spiritual practice, its rising popularity in Europe is known and it is often viewed as a religion. It has been well documented by the latest England and Wales census reporting Shamanism to be Britain’s fastest-growing religion.
In reality, shamanism aims to be ´an authentic expression of mankind’s spirituality´ as described by the Shamanism UK website, so this is technically false. Shamanism is of course equally an indispensable part of Asian, Latin-American, Southern American, South African and North American culture, and looks to continue to exist into the distant future just as it existed so long ago in the past.
Ayahuasca retreats
People travel from across the world to countries like Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Ecuador to participate in multi-day Ayahuasca retreats led by shamans specialised in ayahuasca ceremonies. The ayahuascan rituals have been shown to be an effective treatment for depression and addiction problems, and as Ayahuasca, a psychedelic, contains DMT and harmine, consumption of the plant is equally known for leading to spiritual breakthroughs. As it is so strong, it is very important in general that shamans help the individual have safe journeys.
Spirit animals and guides
Of course, shamans may vary a lot in their beliefs depending on their culture and calling, but in general will they believe humans have guides, of course generally speaking, they will mean this positively though with good there come bad ones. Some will utilise animals symbolically and inform their clients or people in the tribe that a certain animal fits their spirit. This spirit animal will carry traits and characteristics that will help the individual handle their life situation in harmony with their natural way of being. Thus, when they go on their inner-journeys, a shaman may receive help or guidance from their guides and view the power animals who reside in this realm, and they can then use their instincts and these metaphors and learnings in order to help heal their clients or themselves. A person may have one or many spirit/totem animals. In some cultures certain spirit animals are particularly archetypal and important, such as to the Laika (the shamans from the Andes, Perus), for whom the serpent, jaguar, eagle and hummingbird all represent vital parts of nature and are viewed as sacred.
Personal viewpoint
Having seen three shamans in person and having had three sessions with other shamans online, I feel it worthwhile to share my opinions about shamans and their capabilities to help, heal or guide. In truth, I was amazed at times by how shamans could absorb negative energies i was carrying or give insight into my personality through entering trance states. That said, I was only amazed by two of the shamans i saw in person, the other was completely a fraud. Online, I found the shamans could be very informative, well-meaning and slightly intuitive but at the same time, each time i was left unsatisfied with their energetic work despite their assurances that they could work non-locally. Worse, on reflection, the online ones were much less accurate personality wise - even getting mistaken some cosmic vows/ chains they thought were harming me. I never had such issues with shamans I saw in person.
Lastly a lot of shamans are fanatical about light, and infinite light, and I have found this incredibly naive after initially getting carried away with them too. One thing I found is that this philosophy is not necessary protective as those shamans would have you believe. On the other hand I avoided completely satanic shamans which exist and have heard complaints that shamans can control people, to which I would say the majority are quite the opposite of, but not all. I never encountered a shaman with too incredible super-powers or who told me anything unbelievable, but I did encounter people who talked about shamans with super-powers and who told me unbelievable things about shamans.
I also find compelling the shamans who believe that everything is prey and everything is predator in the world. When we humans, considered apex predators, imagine dying we imagine leaving the world - yet physically we return to the earth, or air, or sea,, depending whether we are buried or cremated (or are eaten by a crocodile). Then we feed the plants, which feed the herbivores, which feed the omnivores and carnivores, and in that way we are all permanently trapped in this world, as part of nature's life and death cycles - both as energy fuel and energy consumers. Understood from this way, everything is connected and serving a purpose.
I feel that such beliefs allows us to process properly the duality of death and life with death being release, even forgiveness and not punishment. We spiritually all know we are not responsible for our environment at birth, but yes for how we change it, yet even that we are not truly responsible for, since our birth/genes were not our choice. Therefore, surely death is the release of the meaningful trap of living. If understood this way, the idea that we are all prey and predator means that we all can partake in freedom (death) and meaning (life). Of course, it also shows that life is in a way eternal, since by dying we feed life, and a part of us surely goes there too.
Epigenetics - a scientific explanation for the long-held shamanic belief in generational curses and gifts
It wasn't long ago that Richard Dawkins, in the book 'The selfish gene' wrote that 'no matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means.' However, epigenetic inheritance is now substantially proven and commonly accepted, even though it conflicts the idea that inheritance happens only through the DNA code that passes from parent to offspring, instead positing that a parent's experience, in the form of epigentic tags or marks, pass down as well to the future generations. Contrary to the fixed sequence of ‘letters’ in our DNA, epigenetic marks can change throughout our life and do so response to our environment and lifestyle. In 2014 a Georgian study on mice demonstrated the power that we are influenced by the experiences of our ancestors, to the point that we can even develop unusual, less "natural" character traits from them in comparison with the rest of humanity. The study was on mice who particularly enjoy cherries and get excited from cherry smell. However, the scientists would electrically shock the mice when they were exposed to the scent of cherries, leading them to have a completely different response to the smell than they had originally, they would freeze.
When these mice had pups - the conditioning stopped and the pups were not given any electric shocks and never were exposed to the smell of cherries. When these mice had pups, the scientists decided to revisit the experiment, and expose the grand-pups to the smell of cherries. They were highly sensitive and fearful to the smell of cherries but not any other smells to which mice normally have a positive reaction to, and the scientists then found a gene in the grandfather's mouses sperm and his puppies had changed shape in the olfactory receptor (it had been demethylated) explaining how the grand pup mice had adapted so fast to problems faced by their grandparents (even though the grand-pups had never been electrically shocked when given the smell of cherries, and not even their parents had either). Epigenetics is only on the past quarter of a century being taken relatively seriously by scientists. It was only in the 1990s that imprinted genes were discovered—sequences that are methylated at an organism’s birth and whose expression depends on which parent they were inherited from. This was what led to the idea that DNA methylation carries information from parent to child, hence why the Georgian study was able to demonstrate the effects of epigenetic inheritance so well.
Numerous epidemiological studies, starting in Sweden have revealed notable correlations between the food supply of grandfathers and health risks to diseases in grandchildren, regardless of their diets. The studies showed grandchildren of grandfathers who hadn't had lots of food available when they were kids themselves were at an increased risk of diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases (albeit not necessarily totally replicating one another - one showed only male descendants were at increased mortal health risks from diseases, not female ones for example). Overall, it was concluded by the Swedes that 'the shock of change in food availability seems to give specific trans-generational responses'. Moreover, studies have shown that soldiers suffering from post-traumatic disorders also pass their traumas on to their kids; meaning it should be perfectly acceptable to receive therapy for traumas which have affected your parents or grandparents.
Thus, it appears modern geneticists have proved shamans correct that we are affected by our ancestors even when they're dead and from what they learnt in their life, even if we are not conscious of what happened - when previous scientists dismissed such beliefs as superstitious and assumed we only retained some of their genes that were otherwise unaffected by their lives.
References
(1) - The selfish gene, Richard Dawkins, 1999
(2) - ' Change in paternal grandmothers´ early food supply influenced cardiovascular mortality of the female grandchildren' NIH paper 2014, Lars Olov Bygren
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